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6 both white and red, but that dont make a nation of fiends. Any nation of people on the face of the Earth, driven out of their country, and from the graves of their parents and children, and "forced into their last ditch," by the weapons of soldiery, and the fiendish use of them will become fiends.

The world know that I have devoted a long life of toil with many privations, in preserving for history and ethnology, what I have seen and admired amongst the North American Indians before "fiends" got amongst them, and they will easily appreciate the painful feelings I have at seeing the "Conquering hero", with more than 5000 miles of frontier under his command and at least the lives of 200.000 humans beings yet at his mercy (of which he is judge, jury, and executioner) beginning his onslaught as he has done with the Piégans, and proclaiming in his letter, the coming fate of the rest.

The removal of Indians into the Reservations, is generally thought to be an easy and a good thing, because people mostly have but an imperfect knowledge of it and its results. Heretofore the credulous Indians have been cajoled into them, being told that there they would be out of the reach of civilization, and have an abundance of game; but by the present policy, when they are no longer willing to move, they are to be "forced" into them.

Every part of the continent, from ocean to ocean, was found peopled with savages, each tribe claiming and hunting over a tract of country just supplying them food enough for their subsistence; and so they have remained to the present day, where they have not been removed. Each tribe, jealous of its own boundaries and its game, has mostly held the surrounding tribes in a state of hostility and warfare; and the consequence of this is, that in any, the remotest part of the great West, every tract of country into which a removed tribe as placed, (it it be capable of sustaining a population) is already peopled with Indians who claim it as their birthright--their own, and every such tract, even to the Pacific coast, is at this time more or less occupied also, by a squatter population of whites.

The results of removing tribes of Indians into these reserves, therefore, are trespass on the rights of other Indians, under new and deadly feuds of both parties, and death from starvation, where there is an increase of consumers, and an absolute deficiency of food; and in all the reservations the other misfortune of the Indians, (and which has been the principal cause of their removals) their destructive contiguity to white men, is actually increased; as all the arable lands in the remote reservations will be occupied, even before the Indians get there, by squatters who get their farms on the Indian Reserves for nothing.

The original occupiers and owners of the soil, thus trespassed upon by two enemies, and the feuds and wars are that must consequently arise with United States troops, already trained in butcheries, and sworn "to protect the settlers" instead of the fiends") it is easy to see in the horizon, the reality of Extermination about which you enquire -- the going down of the sun (and its last glimmering rays) of the North American Indians. Sincerely yours, Geo. Catlin